Author: VD

Rabbits in the NFL

Never give them any quarter.  None.  They never, ever stop trying to exert control over everything you think, say, and do:

Comedian and radio show Artie Lange went from player to player at media day, as we understand it, asking outlandish questions until someone game him an outlandish answer.  That someone was 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver, who expressed strong opinions against the possibility of a gay teammate, creating a major distraction for his team.

But the obvious apologies and retractions shouldn’t be the end of it, in the opinion of Seahawks punter Jon Ryan.  Ryan believes that Culliver should be suspended.

“If Chris Culliver isn’t suspended by Goodell then I am absolutely embarrassed to be part of a league that accepts this type of behavior,” Ryan said on Twitter.

Who cares if Jon Ryan is embarrassed or not?  It’s not behavior, it is free speech and freedom of thought.  Culliver was perfectly within his rights to speak about what he thinks and Ryan should quit the league if he’s such a delicate flower.  Ryan should also be given a lecture by Roger Goodell about who is responsible for the NFL’s disciplinary processes and who is not.

If suspending people from their jobs for expressing their opinions is now the norm, then obviously it is fair for Christians to demand the suspension of everyone who dares to say anything that contradicts the Bible in any way.  It won’t be long before the Muslims will get into the game too, as they already are in London and some of the European cities.  It should be interesting to see how fast homosexuals abandon their public pressure tactics when they belatedly realize they are outnumbered by an enemy far more implacable than they ever imagined Christians to be.

The Ripped Life

An old friend of mine has launched a new business that should be of some interest to the Paleo advocates out there, particularly Supernaut.  It’s called PaleoLife Foods and he describes it as “an ultra-premium, natural nutritional foods company that
was founded on the core, Paleo/Primal Diet-inspired belief that the
foods we put into our bodies should be nothing but the truly
highest-quality, freshest, REAL whole foods as close to nature as
possible — and made up of ingredients that we, as humans, not only
evolved on for millennia but THRIVED on.”

PaleoLife has a new bar out that is available on Amazon and has gotten very good reviews.  I haven’t tried it myself, since my box hasn’t arrived yet, but as my friend is an aesthete of the highest order, I’d be very surprised if it was unpalatable.  If you’re already eating Paleo or are flirting with the idea, you might want to check out their Primal Cocoanut.

Speaking of the Ripped Life, I’ve finally been able to get back onto my 5x/week routine now that the calcio season and the holidays are over.  I’ve learned to take it a little easier, stop when I feel something, and protect my joints a bit, which appears to have helped in avoiding all the niggling little injuries to which I am prone given my distaste for changing my routine.  A minor bicep issue means I still can’t comfortably do pull-ups behind the head, which is frustrating, but the gym has a nice free-weighted rowing machine that, in combination with chin-ups, serves as an adequate substitute for the time being.

That settles that

The month-long experiment has come to an end.  The results are in.  I was more than a little curious about what sort of effect the end of my WND column would have on the blog.  After all, the blog only began as a sort of permanent mailbag to replace the little mailbags at the end of the column, and it initially became useful to me as a means of responding to multiple emails about the same column at once.  It was so effective in this regard that the numbers of emails I received about the current column eventually dropped from dozens per day to only a few per week despite the fact that the column readership grew considerably over the same period.

It seemed to make sense that because a lot of people originally first came to visit VP by way of WND, we would see a noticeable decline in the traffic here without my column there.  That didn’t bother me, as traffic has never been a priority here and I assumed all the regulars would likely continue to swing by.  I was more than a little tired of fruitlessly attempting to advocate liberty to a crowd that was much less interested in it, on average, than in being in a position to dictate to the other half of the country.  That is why, at the end of the experiment yesterday, I was surprised to learn that after retiring my column on December 31, VP traffic not only did not decline last month, but increased to 630,860 Google pageviews, (895,311 combined with AG), up nearly 20 percent from the previous month. 

What happened?  It wasn’t the SFWA presidential campaign that made the difference; there aren’t that many SF/F writers in the first place and most of them don’t pay any attention to the election.  A fair number of rabbits did come by the one day to show how they could hop on one foot and shake their fluffy little cottontails on command, but less than appear from a single Instalink.  Nor were there any Instalinks to VP in January to skew things upward, though there was one to AG.  What happened was that two weeks after seeing there were no negative effects on traffic from the end of the column, I added a link to VP from AG for the first time.  The unexpected increase in January almost entirely comes from that little modification to the AG layout.  Go figure.

What I learned is that while there is a significant amount of overlap between the two blogs, as anyone who recognizes the regular commenter names can tell, there is rather less than I assumed.  I never bothered linking the one from the other because I thought that everyone who went to AG was already a VP reader.  That was initially the case, I’m sure, but it is clearly no longer true, especially in light of the emails I’ve received from AG readers who were clearly surprised to discover the existence of this blog.  I’ve said from the start that because the human interest in all things socio-sexual is considerably greater than in pretty much anything else, AG would eventually surpass VP.  That hasn’t happened yet, but at the present rate, it should take place within two years even though, as the chart shows, VP is still growing at a reasonable pace itself.

So, it would appear that I was wrong and those of you who said WND was no longer doing anything material for me from a readership perspective were correct.  I admit it.  You may commence the crowing now.

While the sole purpose of this blog remains the Amusement Imperative, which concerns entertaining myself in whatever manner happens to strike me at the moment, I do appreciate the way in which the Dread Ilk continue to contribute to the discourse here in their inimitable manner.  It’s remarkable how even the class of anklebiters has gradually improved over the years.  They may still be nipping at the sweet, sweet taste of my ankles, but at least they are aware they are doing so and not operating under the illusion they are gnawing through the foundations of Western Civilization or the last remaining supports of the Patriarchy.

Alert the OED

Roissy coins a new term:

When men are men and women are women, the sex is more frequent. And
probably hotter, too. When men are scalzied manboobs and women are
manjawed feminists, the bedroom is an arid wasteland of dashed passion.

Sexual polarity — the primal force that adheres the cosmic cock to
the celestial snatch — is the truth of truths that belies every feminist
assertion ever made in the history of that insipid, leprotic ideology.
May the losers of the world quake and fall to their knees before its
divine directive.

This isn’t a truth borne of social constructs, or of cultural
conditionings, or of privileges of privilege. It’s a truth woven into
the fabric of our origin atoms, the glue that binds our helical
commandments and reaches outward to breathe life into the monolith of
our souls.

It is what is.

The man is a wordsmith of uncommon skill and violence.  He takes words and makes them his own in much the same way McRapey informs us he treats women.  And speaking of McRapey, it was more than a little amusing to see Roissy utilize the term “scalzied” in a sentence.

But precisely what does it mean for someone to be scalzied?  In the context given, I can only conclude that it means for a man to have become accustomed to assuming a servile and inferior demeanor in relation to women based on a mistaken impression that doing so would curry favor with them.  Naturally, I defer to Roissy if I have somehow failed to grasp his neologism in its entirety.

As for the study that is the main subject of his post, I’ll address it on Alpha Game tomorrow, since a considerable number of people have been kind enough to bring it to my attention.  Translation: thank you and you can stop emailing it to me now….

UPDATE:  Johnny is very bravely keeping a smile on his face and attempting to pretend that he thinks this is all so very much fun and adorable.  Which is great, because I certainly find it amusing too and I’m more than happy to continue to amusing him and his fellow rabbits accordingly. The thing is, he appears to be under the misapprehension that I had anything to do with whatever it was that inspired his latest inspirational message.  Unfortunately, I can’t take any credit for it.  Strangely enough, I’m responding to a post he wrote about me describing how I frequently write about him when I hadn’t, in fact, done so.  This is all beginning to get a little meta.


“Folks, as you may know, out there on the Internets there is a Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit who at the moment has an adorable mancrush on me. This means that he can hardly go a day or two without saying something about me on his Web site, usually something which reflects his own deep and abiding personal insecurities. And of course, this is his prerogative; if it makes him feel better about himself and pumps up his social status with his clutch of equally insecure racist sexist homophobic dipshit admirers, then by all means he can spout as much garbage about me as he likes. It does no harm to me (as noted before, no one outside his little huddle of bigots gives much mind to anything he has to say about anything, much less anything  he has to say about me) and I suppose it keeps him from playing in traffic. So, fine.”

Isn’t it wonderful that everyone is fine with it?  It should certainly be fascinating to see McRapey attempt to pretend The Chateau is as trivial and little-regarded as Vox Popoli.  I wonder what clever name he’ll come up with for Roissy?  I am, after all, but a humble superintelligence, while Roissy is the one of the true geniuses of our generation.

Race-based contraception

This contraception scandal in Israel is rather timely news in light of the recent discussion concerning racism:

The director of the Ministry of Health in Israel, Roni Gamzo, has
issued a formal directive instructing that gynaecologists should not
inject women with the contraceptive Depo-Provera without their knowledge
or consent.

The directive, issued last week, comes after around 30 Ethiopian Jews
who had emigrated to Israel said they had been told that they would not
be allowed into the country without receiving the contraceptive drug.  Within Israel, Ethiopian Jews make up the majority of those given the
drug, according to a report published in 2010 by Isha le’Isha, a
women’s rights organization; 57 percent of women who had received the
drug in Israel are Ethiopian Jews, although they account for less than 2
percent of the overall population.

I found it to be particularly interesting in light of how American Jewish support for third world immigration is largely based on their parents’ and grandparents’ experience in America.  Perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is deeply concerned with all things even potentially racist, will find the time to look into who is responsible for this involuntary contraceptive program.

Vaccine “safety” and the swine flu vaccine

I find it tragically unsurprising how even with more than 800 confirmed cases of something as rare as teenage narcolepsy staring them in the face, the vaccine providers are still staunchly holding to their usual position of “no causal link”:

Emelie is one of around 800 children in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe who developed narcolepsy, an incurable sleep disorder, after being immunised with the Pandemrix H1N1 swine flu vaccine made by British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline in 2009.

Finland, Norway, Ireland and France have seen spikes in narcolepsy cases, too, and people familiar with the results of a soon-to-be-published study in Britain have told Reuters it will show a similar pattern in children there.

Their fate, coping with an illness that all but destroys normal life, is developing into what the health official who coordinated Sweden’s vaccination campaign calls a “medical tragedy” that will demand rising scientific and medical attention.

Europe’s drugs regulator has ruled Pandemrix should no longer be used in people aged under 20. The chief medical officer at GSK’s vaccines division, Norman Begg, says his firm views the issue extremely seriously and is “absolutely committed to getting to the bottom of this”, but adds there is not yet enough data or evidence to suggest a causal link.

Perhaps, as supposed to be the case with the increase in autism, what we’re seeing here is nothing more than a sudden increase in the parental awareness of narcolepsy…. What one always has to keep in mind when hearing the pro-vaccine parrots squawking “no causal link, no causal link” is that the standard they use for a causal link would eliminate the link between “being shot in the head” and “death” in the vast majority of lethal shootings.

In most cases, unless someone keels over dead after receiving a vaccination while still in the doctor’s office, the vaccine propagandists will claim that there is no link between the administration of the vaccine and the resultant harm that has been suffered by the individual receiving it.  Of course, having personally witnessed an individual collapse unconsciousness within two seconds of receiving a vaccine and hearing the doctor exclaim “oh, no”, I tend to have a considerably more skeptical outlook concerning the purported safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule than the average individual.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that vaccines are not entirely safe, nor as they as safe as the vaccine advocates claim they are.  The precise degree to which they are unsafe is completely unknown, by either side, because no real and replicable scientific experiments have been performed concerning the current U.S. vaccine schedule.

Furthermore, we also know for an absolute fact that the vaccine manufacturers cherry-pick their statistical studies purporting to demonstrate the safety of the products they are selling.  The only rational position one can take concerning the safety of vaccines is a cautiously skeptical one, particularly in light of the legal immunity granted to those who manufacture, sell, and administer them.

To be clear, I am not against all vaccines.  I even received a tetanus shot when my kneecap was torn open on the soccer field a few years ago.  But it is also perfectly clear to me that not all vaccines are equally safe, or equally necessary.

Triple-dip

Not that the BEA figures actually matter any more than any other fiction being published these days, but now that Obama has been safely re-elected, the economic bad news can be released again:

A stunner out of the BEA which just reported a Q4 GDP of -0.1% that
was leaps and bounds below the 1.1% estimate, and a plunge from Q3’s
3.1%. The factors: Private Inventories, Exports and Government
Expenditures all of which contracted, by -1.27%, -0.81%, and -1.33%. The
silver lining was in Personal Consumption Expenditures which added
1.52% to the negative print, most of it however driven by a surge in
spending ahead of the fiscal cliff. Ironically, this was the biggest
government-driven detraction from growth since Q1 2011, when GDP led to a
-1.49% cut in the GDP, same in Q4 when government spending on defense
fell the most since 1972. The solution is simple: print moar drones. Enter Mali. And since everything is now AMZN-ing, we can’t wait for the spin that the GDP’s margins were actually better than expected, leading to a 200 point surge in the DJIA.

How many recessionary dips will it take before the mainstream financial media admits that we’ve been in a depression since 2008?  My guess is five.

I am still not a conservative

Ed Trimnell is operating from a fundamentally flawed logical foundation in his defense of what he calls conservatism:

Today I read a piece on Vox Day’s blog, entitled “Women ruin everything.” (Vox Day bills himself as a conservative.)

Leaving the title aside, most of the blog post deals with the excesses of the radical gender  politics that have arisen in collegiate sports since the passage of Title IX. In other words: the excesses of leftwing, political feminism. This portion of the post is generally reasonable, and generally conservative.

But then Vox ends his post with a non sequitur:

 “Do you really think it was an accident that women were never permitted any voice in the governance of the Roman Republic or the great historical democracies such as Athens, Thebes, Imperial Britain, and Revolutionary America?  Do you really believe it to be a mere coincidence that many modern democracies, including Germany, Italy, and the member states of the European Union, were not able to survive even 100 years of female suffrage?”

What about Jeane Kirkpatrick–and Margaret Thatcher? Would Vox seriously deny these women the vote? (A true conservative would not apportion any political privileges or penalties based on race or gender. Once again–that is the game of the Left and the Democratic Party.)

The implication in Vox’s post is that members of one gender are inherently wiser than those of the other. And there is one gender which–by virtue of being that gender–“ruins everything,” in his words.

This is exactly what the radical feminists say–only in reverse.

Conservatives cannot fight irrational gender politics by becoming sexists ourselves, just as we cannot fight the tribal politics of the race card by becoming racists. Conservatism is for men as well as women–and for people of all races and ethnicities. (Let us not forget that most of the welfare states in Europe are essentially the creations of white males, while there are some fairly astute Asian capitalists. And yes–some of them are women.)

The logical flaws in Vox’s “Women ruin everything” post are obvious. What is not so obvious is how this sort of rhetoric plays into the hands of Obama and the Obamaites.

One phony conservative can do more damage to the conservative movement than all the prattling leftwing lemmings on The Daily Kos and John Scalzi’s Whatever combined.

I will begin by pointing out that Mr. Trimnell’s reasoning is generally sound, as evidenced by his observations concerning the material difference between Vox Popoli and the warren that is Whatever.  However, his reasoning happens to go significantly awry here because it is built upon false foundations and erroneous assumptions.

First, I do not bill myself as a conservative.  I am not a conservative.  Neither am I a Republican.  I have never claimed to be either since I first began writing political op/ed in 2001.  While I did briefly belong to the Young Republicans in 1988 and attended both the national convention in Houston as well as the inaugural ball, I have never voted for a Republican for President. To the best of my recollection I registered as a Libertarian in 1992 and have only ever voted for Libertarian presidential candidates.  It may be worth noting that my blog is repeatedly listed as one of the top libertarian sites and my positions on the drug war, the foreign wars, immigration, the banks, and free trade, among many others, are considerably different than the conventional conservative positions.

Second, the connection between the observed and incoherent evils of Title IX and female suffrage is far from a non sequitur.  It may be ironic and unexpected that feminism can ruin even the most notable fruits of feminism, but it was both anticipated and predicted by many brilliant past writers that women’s suffrage would bring about both “the despotism of the petticoat” better known today as liberal fascism as well as the eventual demise of those societies that were foolish enough to embrace it.

In answer to his question, I would absolutely deny women such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Margaret Thatcher the vote if the responsibility was given to me.  (It may interest some to know that I’ve actually met both women; I even have a picture of me with Mrs. Kirkpatrick around here somewhere.)  While Mrs. Thatcher was a great woman of genuine courage, she betrayed her country in the end.  And she did so for the very reason women would not be permitted to vote in any society that wishes to sustain itself: she was taken in by the lies of dishonest men.

“We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were
apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held
to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary
to our interests.”
– Lady Margaret Thatcher, “The Downing Street Years”

Third, while one “gender” is not wiser than the other, gender being a grammatical construct, it is an observable, provable, statistical, and scientific fact that the two sexes possess different brain structures, different thought patterns, different hormonal balances, and different time-preferences.  By a timely coincidence, I happened to address this very subject on Alpha Game earlier today.

“[I]f one is able to understand how women’s cumulative socio-sexual
preferences affect the housing market and the economy, how is it
possible that one is not able to understand that those preferences will
also affect the governance of a nation as well as the scope of human
liberty deemed legally permissible.”

What Trimnell fails to realize here is that he is inadvertently attempting to undermine everything from insurance premiums to science and human reason, which I would characterize as a profoundly unconservative act.  Due to its false foundations, his “conservatism” is not only neither rational nor coherent, it is more firmly in accordance with the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution than anything that can be credibly identified with conservative thought dating back to Athens.

Once he claims that “Conservatism is for men as well as women–and for people of all races and ethnicities”, it should be eminently clear that he is unwittingly preaching the same sort of revolutionary equalitarian nonsense that real conservatives, who have always understood that there are fundamental differences of race and culture, have rejected for centuries.  It is pure equalitarianism, which is based on an intellectual foundation every bit as credible and materially substantive as unicornology and leprechaunics.

As for fighting tribal politics, I would submit that they cannot be understood, much less engaged, without becoming what he describes as “racist” and what I would describe as “scientifically and historically observant” or even “sub-speciesist”.  It is a little ironic that men like Mr. Trimnell are still trying to argue that race does not exist when genetic science has demonstrated that humanity is not even made up of the same sub-species.  As it no doubt justifies its own detailed debate, I shall set aside, for now, the obvious observation that to not be sub-speciesist is absolutely and necessarily equivalent to denying human evolution.

In summary, I recommend Spengler, the real Spengler, to Mr. Trimnell, as well as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as a corrective.  He is an intelligent man, so I have little doubt that even a modicum of exposure to such classic works will prove an effective palliative to the equalitarian propaganda in which he, like me and most of the readers here, was steeped throughout his intellectually formative years.

Since I am not a phony conservative, or indeed, a conservative of any kind, I hope that Mr. Trimnell will understand my concern for any potentially negative effect upon the “conservative” movement is a matter of complete and utter indifference to me.  I should also note that  for once, I am in complete accordance with Mr. Trimnell’s commenter, as Hunt correctly notes: “I think it’s important to say that you should not feel as if you are in
any way obligated to account for anything VD happens to think or say….
VD would
probably not pledge any allegiance to the conservatism that you support.”

I am, of course, entirely willing to defend my positions from Mr. Trimnell’s assertions, be they reasonable and compelling or not.  I hope it is readily apparent that I am only attacking what I see as the deficiencies in his ideas, not his character.

Do caterpillars fear the cocoon?

I know all atheists are not in denial concerning their mortality.  But it is informative to see how people tend to become more open-minded towards religious matters as they approach life’s finish line.  I tend to suspect the relative irreligion of the young is more indicative of an erroneous belief in their own immortality than any sort of genuine disbelief.

 My father has lived in a state of blissful denial his entire life. He
used to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, and until he was seventy
he drank a quart of scotch a day. His diet consists of steak, salami,
potatoes, bread, cheese, mayonnaise, ice cream, and pie.

By this afternoon, my father’s pain was alleviated substantially, and
he began bitching about how he was going to get off the oxycontin after
he recovered. He told me recently that until he was eighty, he honestly
thought he’d live forever. I didn’t say, “Really? You thought you’d
live in your house here in Los Angeles for trillions and trillions and
trillions of years, making your wooden toys, watching Bill O’Reilly, and
eating salami sandwiches with an inch of cheddar cheese, for all
eternity?”

I didn’t say that because my father’s fear of death is irrational. It
would be cruel to subject him to that sort of conversation…. When my father was eighty-three, he had an operation on his hand.
Since he takes blood thinners, any surgery is risky. They had to prepare
to do an emergency transfusion. In discussing his fears with him, I
mentioned that I couldn’t donate blood because I lived in Britain for
two years during the eighties. Due to the risk that I may have ingested
the prion that causes Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, I’m permanently barred
from donating blood. This made my father terrified that he might get
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease if he got a transfusion.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It has a forty-year incubation period.”

His face fell. “Are you saying I’m not going to be here in forty
years?” He was horrified and his feelings were hurt. I thought he’d
laugh, but I’d scared him. He went to bed chilled to the bone at the
thought that he might not live to be 123.

We are all going to die eventually.  After a long life of joy, happiness, love, and good works, one hopes, but regardless, sooner or later, the final day will come.  This is why it is vital for us to make the most of our lives, to balance the urgent need to make a living and support our families with truly important matters such as serving God, spreading the Good News, and making some sort of positive mark to permit future generations to realize that we were here.

We can spend our days seeking mindless pleasure, but hedonism burns out fast and leaves little more than a burned-out shell behind.  We can live in fear and denial, or we can live in nihilistic stoicism, attempting to manufacture our own meaning and desperately trying to convince others of what we do not truly believe ourselves.  Or we can live by faith, trusting God, accepting that we are merely caterpillars and death is nothing more than a cocoon we must endure before we can take flight.

And what is true of men is true of nations.  America is entering its cocoon.  Who is to say with any certainty that what will eventually result will not be better than what came before.

Even fools, horses, and liberals

Keep this in mind when the unilateral involuntary disarmament crowd tried to portray the no-compromise position as extreme:

An interesting little factoid has emerged from a new Fox News poll of U.S. voters: Personal sentiments are strong and defiant among many U.S. gun owners.

“If the government passed a law to take your guns, would you give up your guns or defy the law and keep your guns?”

The response: 65 percent reported they would “defy the law.” That incudes 70 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of conservatives, 52 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of liberals.

I find it fascinating that even most liberals and Democrats who own guns aren’t dumb enough to buy into the idea that a forcible government monopoly on violence is a good idea.